How we found £8,400 in hidden costs for an Aberdeen SaaS startup
In November 2024, we sat down with an 8-person software team near Union Grove to look at their overheads. They knew they were spending too much on tools, but nobody had the time to go line-by-line through the Xero bank feed. We spent 4 days digging into their subscriptions and found exactly where the money was leaking.
The 14-month ledger deep dive
We started the process on Tuesday, 12 November, by pulling every transaction from the previous 14 months. For a small tech firm in Aberdeen, software spend often feels like a fixed cost, but it rarely is. This specific client was spending roughly £4,180 per month across 47 different SaaS subscriptions. Our first job was to map every single one of those payments to a specific department or team member to see who was actually using the tools.
By Wednesday afternoon, we noticed that 14% of the monthly spend had no clear owner. People leave companies, but their recurring seats often stay active for months. In this case, three developers who left in mid-2023 still had active 'Pro' licenses for a suite of testing tools. That alone was costing the company £212 every single month. It is the kind of boring, administrative leak that founders often miss when they are focused on building their product or chasing their next round of funding.
Our team, led by Duncan Ross, didn't just look for obvious cancellations. We compared the tier of service they were paying for against their actual usage logs. For example, they were on an Enterprise plan for their CRM despite only having 8 active users. Downgrading that single service to the 'Team' tier saved them another £140 per month without removing a single feature they actually used for their daily sales operations in the North East.
Small leaks sink big ships. We found 47 subscriptions for an 8-person team, many of which were forgotten.
The cloud hosting 'Ghost' instances
Cloud hosting is usually the largest expense for any SaaS startup after salaries. This client was using AWS, and their monthly bill had crept up from £800 to £1,650 over the last year. When we looked into the billing dashboard on Thursday morning, we found 4 'test' environments that had been left running since a sprint back in February 2024. These instances were doing absolutely nothing but burning cash while they sat idle in the background.
Shutting these down took about 15 minutes of work with their CTO, but the impact was massive. Those 4 instances were costing £318 per month. Over the course of a year, that is £3,816 that was effectively being set on fire. We also spotted that they were paying for premium support on a service level they didn't require. Honestly, most startups don't need 24/7 dedicated engineer access when they are still in the early growth phase and have a capable internal team.
We ended up restructuring their hosting plan to better match their traffic patterns. By switching to a different instance type for their database and cleaning up old snapshots that were over 2 years old, we shaved a total of £490 off their monthly hosting bill. These are the technical details that traditional accountants usually skip, but at Onbelai, we look at the spreadsheets and the tech stack together to find the real savings.
Double-billing and the PayPal trap
One of the strangest things we found was a double-payment for a popular project management tool. The company was paying £114 via a corporate credit card, but there was a second payment for the same tool coming out of an old PayPal account linked to the founder's personal email. This had been happening since October 2022. They had been paying twice for the same 10 seats for over two years because the accounts were never merged.
We contacted the vendor on Thursday afternoon and provided the transaction IDs for both accounts. While we couldn't get a full 24-month refund, we did manage to secure a credit of £420 towards their future bill. It wasn't just this one tool, either. We found 3 other instances where different team members had signed up for the same 'stock photo' service using different email addresses. It is a common problem in decentralised teams where everyone has a company card.
To fix this, we helped them set up a single 'Software Registry' spreadsheet. Now, before any team member signs up for a new tool, they have to check if the company already has a license. This simple step, which took us 2 hours to set up and explain to the team, will likely prevent at least £1,000 in redundant spend over the next 12 months. It's about building a culture where numbers actually matter to everyone on the payroll.
They were paying for the same 10 seats twice for over two years. A simple audit got them a £420 credit back.
Cleaning up the ledger in 4 days
Our cleanup process is designed to be fast because we know founders don't have weeks to spend on admin. Monday was for data gathering, and by Friday morning, we had a final report ready for the board. We don't just give you a list of things to cancel; we actually sit with the person who has the login details and watch them click the 'cancel' button. If you don't do it right then, it often gets forgotten for another month.
By the end of the week, the total annualised savings for this Aberdeen startup was £8,412. For a company of this size, that is equivalent to a significant percentage of their monthly burn. It is often the difference between needing to raise money in 6 months versus having the runway to wait for a better valuation. We didn't cut anything that helped them build their product; we just removed the 'fluff' that had accumulated over 3 years of business.
The client was surprised by how much of the waste was just 'auto-renewals' for things they had tried for a week and forgotten. We now perform a 'Lite' version of this audit for them every 6 months. It takes us about 4 hours now that the system is set up, and it keeps their finance department clean and investor-ready. If you haven't looked at your 'Other Expenses' line in your P&L lately, you are probably overpaying for something right now.
How to run your own mini-audit
If you want to try this yourself, start by looking at every transaction under £50. These are the ones that slip through the cracks. In our experience, about 30% of these small charges are for things the team no longer uses. Group your vendors by category—hosting, marketing, productivity, and HR. If you have more than 3 vendors in any single category, you probably have a redundancy that can be cut or consolidated.
Check your 'User Seats' once a quarter. This is the easiest way to save money. We often find that companies pay for 20 seats when they only have 14 employees. Those 6 extra seats might only be £15 each, but that is £1,080 a year gone for nothing. Also, check for 'annual' vs 'monthly' billing. If you know you are going to use a tool for the next 12 months, switching to an annual plan usually saves you around 20% immediately.
Lastly, look at your bank statements for 'forgotten' trials. Most people sign up for a 7-day free trial and forget to cancel. At Onbelai, we suggest using a dedicated virtual card for all software trials. If you forget to cancel, you can just freeze the card. It's a simple trick that has saved our clients thousands of pounds over the last 7 years. Plain English finance isn't about complex formulas; it's about paying attention to where every pound actually goes.
